Watch the subtitled video above if you prefer to listen to my advice.
If you don’t go no contact after a breakup and fail to give your ex girlfriend space, it can often come across as if you’re stalking her. And the more you miss her after the breakup, the higher your obsession becomes. You message her even though she wants to be left alone, you start lurking on her social media profile, look at her stories, and employ any means to find out what she is up to because you’re looking for a sign that she misses you. To an ex girlfriend, intrusive & needy behavior like this makes you look like a stalker.
Of course, there are levels of desperation after a breakup ranging from an emotional long late-night message to your ex girlfriend, to sending her a truck of flowers and tagging her in an Instagram post about it, to buying a 5 million dollar house next door so you can “be close to the kids”. Of course, on some level, I can relate to Ye’s erratic behavior. I mean, who hasn’t sent an impulsive message to their ex-girlfriend at least once in their life, right? But the moral of that particular story is that after a breakup there’s reasonable “I want to live within 15 minutes driving distance of my kids” behavior, and then there’s “Oh my God! He’s staring at me inside my window from across the street, someone please call the police” levels of desperate behavior. And it doesn’t take a genius to know that the only reasonable response that a woman feels when she’s confronted with a stalker is run as fast as possible.
If you’ve gone down the road of messaging your ex a lot after the breakup, not going no contact with her, begging and pleading repeatedly, or in the worst-case scenarios lurking on her social media, showing up at her place, and contacting her through her friends, then you’re probably wondering if you screwed up your chances with your ex. Can you fix it if you stalked your ex?
So let’s get into the situation of a man who’s struggling a lot to stay no contact and unfortunately is an example of what not to do after a breakup. He is anything but low-key with his no contact approach. With an ex girlfriend, you always want to give her space to calm down so she will switch from a mode of frustration, back to a mode of longing and curiosity. When you messed up with your ex-girlfriend, she will always naturally realign with the feelings of love that she has for you rather than focusing on her short-lived feelings of frustration. But to achieve that, texting your ex too much and stalker-ish behaviors after a breakup need to be kept at a minimum. So, let’s dissect the problem.
Panic after a Breakup: Is it OVER if you Acted Needy and Desperate after a Breakup?
Hello, coach. I screwed up so much and I need to find out if there’s any way how I can still undo my mistakes with my ex-girlfriend. I had been extremely insecure after our breakup and had been stalking her to the point where her best friend told me to back up. So here’s my story.
Well, the truth is that no contact works on everyone and with every scenario. Will an ex magically fall back in love with you once you stopped pushing the limits with her? No, of course not, but at the very least, you won’t make it worse. One of the most common things after a breakup, even if you haven’t been an extremely desperate ex boyfriend, like let’s say maybe you’ve been begging a little bit, relatively reasonably, like you lost your cool, became afraid of losing her forever, and as a result you kept on messaging her for a few weeks.
Honestly, almost every friend of your ex girlfriend is going to hate you, think that you should keep your distance, and will trash talk you in front of your ex. There’s always an exception. If the friends of your ex actually speak up for you and give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re a great guy who maybe just made a bunch of mistakes, then your ex is lucky to have that friend. But most women suffer from princess-syndrome after a breakup.
- You just couldn’t see her worth
- She deserved so much better
- You didn’t treat her right, so another guy should
- You didn’t read her mind so it’s justified that you split up
- You always made her feel trapped, she should enjoy life a little
In a nutshell, your typical modern woman feminist entitlement, which suggests that all good things in life should come for free, in limitless amounts, with 0 conditions applied to it. And if you’d be a woman who’s hurting after a breakup, hearing entitled female talking points will feel like validation and salvation.
After a breakup we are easily manipulated to believe whatever narrative someone feeds us. And female friends of your ex will almost always spin such a narrative not out of concern for their friend, but rather for themselves —especially if her friends are a bad influence in general. Female friends will want you to be out of the picture so they can be in their comfort zone with their bestie who always supports them, no matter how much they mess up in their own lives. The undivided attention of your ex girlfriend is like a currency to her bestie/s. They want to horde it for themselves while they can because she won’t be single forever.
Obviously, not every friend of your ex will be a bottom-feeding, low quality woman who just trash-talks you because it’s convenient for them. Some friends of your ex have genuine concerns and calling out some of your behaviors is something a good friend would and should do. The point I’m making here is to go easy on yourself. We’ll see in your story that you have messed up a lot, and you should be under no illusion otherwise but also recognize that her friends would have had a similar reaction even if you hadn’t gone all Kanye-level stalking on her.
Dissappointed your Ex Girlfriend: When you Neglected your Ex-Girlfriend All The Time
Three months ago, my ex-girlfriend and I broke up. It was a spontaneous breakup after a very big fight. We have been arguing a lot about priorities in life. She accused me of being consumed with my work. At the same time, she was being very cold towards me back then. She was right that I was quite obsessed with work because I wasn’t happy with how my career was going. I’m not the best time manager, so work was very stressful. Anyway, the relationship had gotten quite tense before our breakup because of disagreements. And then that one time, I had to urgently finish some work over our summer break because I wasn’t finished with my work yet. So I had to work in between our planned trips, and even while I was for visit over at her parent’s house, etc.
That’s the paradox of dating a woman. A woman will love you for being an ambitious hard worker — and she’ll hate you for being an ambitious harder worker. Your girlfriend wants you to have your priorities in life straight and work hard to be successful. But at the same time, if you don’t make your girlfriend a priority, she will de-prioritize you. Not prioritizing your girlfriend is as naive as a startup founder who is planning to build lots of amazing features into his web app, when his team hasn’t even launched version one of his product yet. All the fantasizing about great features and service would mean nothing if in two years from now, you would realize that the entire product vision was wrong and instead, your business pivoted in a completely different direction.
And in a relationship, just like that, all your hard work to advance your career, to provide for your family and be able to live the dream as a couple will be pointless if you’ve neglected your girlfriend — because then there won’t be a family to provide for in the future.
Masculine energy and the pursuit of goals are essential and necessary to keep your girlfriend excited to be with you. But you need to be able to multi-task your priorities. You should be within a 50/50 range of prioritizing your growth goals and your relationships. And there should be a delta of 10 or 15% delta depending on your current circumstances. Sometimes life calls for a little bit of extra attention on your business or job, and at other times, your girlfriend, family, and friends call for more attention.
You made a deliberate choice to not choose your girlfriend when you worked too much. Whether it’s for the Christmas holidays, a summer vacation, or a Thanksgiving family dinner, you should be able to make time for these important dates. You can’t get back the time and memories you’ve lost, but work can always be replaced or done on another day.
I would go as far as saying that time management is a relationship skill. Managing your time poorly when you’re single, hustling, and focused on getting things done is easy. Every man can pump a few extra hours into any goal when his only responsibilities are to himself. But when you are responsible for the happiness of at least two people, you need to choose your priorities wisely.
Most guys work hard exactly because they want to be their own man. To be able to choose when and how they work. But Rome wasn’t built in one day. Nobody should ever be able to ask you to work on an important date. Especially when you are not legally required to do so. Spend time with the woman who values your time and don’t give your time to bosses and business partners who don’t value yours.
Never sacrifice your time with your girlfriend unless what you gain out of that transaction is worth it. You’re unlikely to reap the rewards unless that extra work time is for your own business. Yes, sometimes it cannot be avoided that your own business would require unexpected work. But even such a scenario would be a reflection of probably not running the business effectively and it would be a sign that you’d need to change your strategy for a better work-life-relationship balance. When you’re confronted with unexpected work, choose wisely because some random work project is something that you’ll hardly remember, but losing a woman because you neglected her is something you’ll remember and regret for the rest of your life.
Seriously, I worked my ass off working at startups in my 20s, and don’t get me wrong, it opened up many doors for me. I learned many things, became competent, and made a very big name for myself. But if I could go back in time, I would trade some much-needed time with my ex-girlfriends for spending too much time on companies that in the end treated me like a wheel in the cog. You will always be replaceable to anyone but the woman who loves you. So work smart, not hard.
If your company makes you work excessively over the holidays or over a planned vacation, then it’s probably not the right company to work for. And maybe it’s not the company’s fault per se. Any boss will squeeze as much productivity out of their employees as possible. If you couldn’t say no to the work, then in the end, it was your mistake for being unable to say “Sorry, but I can’t do the work for the next 3 days because we are traveling” — saying no to unreasonable work is a boundary that you should learn to keep up to protect the health of your relationship.
So learn to say no to the things that don’t serve your happiness. If you get back with your ex-girlfriend and you haven’t addressed that problem of yours, you’ll always revert back to a weak beta male people-pleaser mindset when your boss asks you to finish a random project on a tight schedule. And then you’ll neglect her again and this time she will be even more pissed. And then your ex girlfriend will break up with you for good because she will think that you’re unable to change and make her a priority.
We had a Big Fight: She Wanted to have Space and Time to Think — She Was DONE with me!
I was super stressed back then, and in that fight, I saw red and really screwed up how I reacted to our argument. So it was very messed up actually. I was visiting her family over the holidays, and that’s where we broke up. It was painful because I had to spend the last 1 1/2 days of my holidays away from home and had to slept in a hotel in an unfamiliar town. I tried to fix things with her before going back home. She stayed with her family a few more days, but she said that she needed time to think. She said she thought it was best for us to have some distance.
That’s the moment when she hit her breaking point. It’s important to recognize that these breaking points that end a relationship never just happen overnight. Your ex didn’t break up with you because you had to work one time during the holidays. On the surface, it may even seem that you broke up because of a massive fight, not the underlying issue. And that’s of course true, but there’s always a deeper root issue that leads to the end of a relationship. I am sure your ex-girlfriend’s annoyance at you working too much stacked up until it began overflowing.
That overflow of annoyance is like a water damn filling up with all kinds of grievances, it’s not necessarily only the work issue. Other frustrations also fill up all the way to the top of the dam until it overflows. Just like a normal dam isn’t intended to overflow, exceeding the limit of what your ex girlfriend can tolerate will damage the relationship as well.
And that’s where then most guys will go wrong when they start panicking after a breakup and don’t give the girlfriend space. Of course, dams are designed to let water flow out of the dam to prevent exactly that from happening. In a relationship, you have the same opportunity to release your girlfriend from her grievances before she becomes too fed up. Good communication, changes in your behaviors, and a more conscious relationship are easy ways to quickly bring everything back to a normal level.
However, unfortunately, when it’s too late but you’re still trying to open up your girlfriend’s heart by addressing her concerns, instead of opening the floodgates to release the pressure, your ex-girlfriend will tighten up further, causing the overflow to get even worse and causing even more damage.
This is why you should always address relationship problems before they become chronic illnesses that plague your girlfriend. However, if you failed to do so, giving her the space and time to think things through is the best approach. It seems counterintuitive, but just because an ex-girlfriend says she needs space after a big fight doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love you anymore. It’s usually the opposite: Being with you hurts her BECAUSE she loves you and she can see that the relationship is broken. So the natural step for a woman is to end it in the hopes to ease the pain. If it hurts so much to be with you, then surely, no longer being with you should be the solution, right?But there’s something bigger than the pain of being in an unhappy relationship and that is losing that relationship!
Yea, right in that moment when her frustration spills over, anything you will do only makes everything worse. She’s absolutely done and is excited to escape the pain. But if you give her time to think about you, the only thing she’ll think about most of the time is how badly she misses you. That’s why you should never pursue an ex-girlfriend.
Chasing your Ex-Girlfriend TOO MUCH: When you Pushed your Ex Girlfriend Away by Begging
Now then, this is where I really messed up. After I got home, I messaged her again, but she just ignored my message. And when she got home as well, I became very obsessed after not hearing from her. By the way, with home, I mean the city where we live. We didn’t live together yet. I tried to message her a few times trying to work things out, but she said that she felt that it was over between us, that things aren’t working out.
It’s understandable that this is how you reacted but no contact after an unexpected breakup like this would have been the perfect time to make her miss you a lot. It was pretty tough that you were out of town — that was really bad timing for a breakup. That made it really hard on you and I’m sure it mentally messed you up quite a bit. In a best-case scenario, she should have actually let you stay at her parent’s place, even if that would have been pretty painful and awkward. I know that for you the situation was difficult, and you might think that it was easy for her because she was at her parent’s house — you’d immediately think there isn’t possibly any better place for her to have a breakup since her parents were there for her. Of course,the situation was easier for her than for you, but it would have been best to sit it out, maybe her parents would have talked some sense into her as well.
And the way that I see it, the fact that you went out of your way to go on a trip and see her parents must mean that both of you are very family-oriented individuals. You’re the kind of man a woman wants to be with, so losing it all right when you were supposed to visit and have a good time with your extended family doesn’t just hurt you, it also hurt her a lot. My best guess would be that you both saw a long-term future with each other that also was focused on family. These problems may have been something that was building up for quite some time, but there’s no way she expected to break up exactly when you were supposed to have a great time together. Losing such an important relationship overnight is painful especially after a big fight.
But big fights are better than having an extremely stoic breakup where your ex girlfriend has apathy after a breakup. Because in such a case, the emotions have faded a lot already and the incentives to get back together are lower, meaning it requires a lot more out of your ex to miss you. But in your case, the big fight shows you that there were intense emotions involved in the relationship. And bad emotions are better than no emotions after a breakup for increased chances to get back together.
Where stoicism and apathy are good is in your behavior after the breakup. Because ex-girlfriends start to miss you and want you back once you are indifferent towards them. That’s when reality sets in for them and they have to properly process everything that happened. And once your ex starts to re-evaluate the situation, her love for you most likely already outweighs her negative feelings because negative feelings always fade much faster than positive ones. Often a few weeks to maybe 2-3 months is all it takes for an ex to give in and want to fix the relationship. Now of course, like I said, you have to get your misalignments in order as well.
And that’s why what you should do after a breakup as a man is cultivate strength, a stoic mind, and resiliency. Self-restraint is key after a breakup. Otherwise, you’ll become a weak man who gives in to his worst impulses — just like a hedonist who always seeks pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure is so subconscious, that of course, after a breakup when you lack control and clarity, you’ll always seek out your pleasure. And what’s the biggest pleasure that you’re missing out on? Of course, it’s your ex girlfriend.
And so when you lack a stoic mindset and instead operate with a hedonistic mindset, you will feel the urge to message her when you…
- “randomly” see a picture of her on your feed, or worse, when you checked out her social media profile
- or when it’s a special date like Valentine’s Day, Christmas holidays, or an important anniversary like her birthday or when you would have had your anniversary as a couple
- you’ll want to get in touch when you feel especially lonely or vulnerable in some way because something bad happened like you got fired, a family is sick, or you lost money in the crypto markets, and so on
- you might be incredibly jealous and lack any sense of dating abundance when you see her talking to another guy on social media
- and of course, if you see some girl who looks like her on a dating app, you’ll think about your ex and want to talk to her instead of that girl
- or maybe it’ll just be something random like one of those annoying apps sending you a reminder of some photo, like Google Photos notifying you “Hey, look how happy you were with your ex exactly one year ago”
All kinds of memories will trigger you after a breakup to break no contact — unless you become a stoic. Stoics accept that there are certain things that they can’t change in the moment. Fighting your current state of reality will only make things worse. You can’t change that your ex is currently done with you. But how you react to that is within your control. You can either chase your ex girlfriend, make her close herself off to you even further, like a dam, or, you pull away, let her experience what life looks like without you, and make her be the one to reach out to you — even though it was her who pushed you away. An ex-girlfriend who truly loves you will pull a complete 180 on you and come back once you act like a strong, self-reliant stoic.
But if you push, chase, or beg, the opposite will happen. This is a common mistake many of my clients made or make. Many men know that they shouldn’t reach out to their ex girlfriend but they do it anyway — and it’s almost always triggered by something random. This is why I always encourage my clients to write down on paper that they won’t message their ex and that they will wait for her to get in touch with them. Especially in the beginning when maintaining a stoic nature is extremely difficult, such a visible reminder is essential. Subconsciously everyone knows you shouldn’t chase your ex but when your emotions get the best of you, you’ll break no contact.
Always remind yourself that you can’t change the current situation. You can’t change how your ex-girlfriend feels about you. The only thing you can change is to facilitate your own growth, redirect your focus towards yourself, and work on the things that were a problem during the relationship. If you don’t stay focused on your aspirations, then you’ll always reach out to your ex-girlfriend when you hit a low point of weakness.
Your ex girlfriend is like a drug. Just like an alcoholic will resort to drinking a bottle of beer when he feels weak, you’ll want to resort to reaching out to your ex. Pain is a strong motivator to do anything to get back to pleasure. But often we seek short-term pleasure rather than long-term gratifications.
I had a client once who had a back injury that was a big problem for him. He was in a lot of pain and he often resorted to alcohol to numb the pain, numb himself, and feel better in general. But of course, that was only a temporary solution, and his alcohol consumption strained the relationship with his girlfriend and eventually they broke up. Of course, his general bad mood because of his pain also added to the problem.
And after the breakup, he became even more of an alcoholic. It’s tempting to fall back to our vices after a breakup when we feel weakest. Weakness leads to vices. Wanting to message your ex girlfriend is also a vice. You need to create clarity that you will not follow your vices, whether that is reaching out to your ex, reminiscing about good times, or wasting your time with anything that serves as a quick dopamine hit. No short-term pleasures will make you feel stronger, become more confident, and be attractive in the eyes of your ex again.
Clarity is king. That client of mine eventually started to get his life in order, continued seeking medical help instead of giving up, he eventually solved his health problems and got back with his long-term girlfriend. And all of it happened because he had a stoic mindset with a clear life plan, instead of being impulsive, spontaneous, and hedonistic.
Stalking your Ex after a Breakup: Sending Ex a Letter and Showing Up at your Ex’s House Unannounced
After I messaged her a few times, I panicked so much and I went overboard. I went to her place and wrote her a letter to tell her how sorry I was about the way I behaved before the breakup. I’m not sure if she got the letter. I also went to her place three more times, but she wasn’t home. One time I even waited in front of her apartment door. The last time I went there, the guard told me that I can’t come in. So I think she already knew and told him to stop me from entering the building.
Yea, this was a big mistake. After a breakup, we lack the ability to think clearly about how our ex-girlfriend feels. You made the assumption that what you felt is roughly the same thing that your ex felt. But just because you think that expressing how you feel about the breakup, the relationship, and how you’d like to do things differently doesn’t mean that this is what she wants right now. She may still love you but she wants her space. Your feelings for her won’t change that. That’s why you should never violate the wishes of your ex-girlfriend when she wants space. It will always be perceived as a violation of her happiness.
When you send an ex back letter to her, like an accountability letter, it won’t be seen as something positive. And especially if you show up at her place uninvited, she will try to go out of her way even further to create more distance between the two of you. Did your ex read the letter that you sent her? Probably not. She most likely just ignored it and is stashing it for a later time. It’s unlikely that she’ll throw it away for now, but by the time she reads the letter it will most likely have the opposite effect of what you had hoped for.
The fact that the guard told you to not come in shows you that you were out of line and your ex had enough. Now, is this the end of the world? No. You certainly made a big mistake here, but big insecure mistakes after a breakup can be forgiven — given that you won’t be a repeat offender. The key to revert such a situation is a long-lasting behavior change. Your ex will remember you as an emotional, desperate man for some time. But after a while, as the bad memories fade, she will not pay much attention to the fact that you dropped off a letter and showed up at her place.
She’ll want to talk to you again. The big deciding factor is whether you then still have similar behaviors of being too aggressive, pushing too much, and too quickly trying to rekindle the relationship, and so on. You generate a snapshot in time when you desperately beg, plead, or even stalk your ex girlfriend after a breakup — but as long as this remains a snapshot, it’s all good.
It’s similar to the Kanye West story. Kanye clearly had some pretty bad bipolar episodes for a while that spanned lots of crazy stuff with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, and it went much further with all kinds of crazy rants. But eventually, he caught himself, went private and I’d like to think he got his life back in order. And I’m sure his relationship with Kim Kardashian has improved a lot ever since. Now, these two will probably never get back together. Who knows, maybe if Kanye ever divorces from his new wife. But I’m sensing they aren’t on extremely bad terms anymore.
Something similar happened to me once. My very first girlfriend was an extremely jealous woman and at some point, when she had yet another crazy jealous girlfriend rant while I was just enjoying my time with her, I kicked her out instantly in that moment and I was done with her. She also showed up at my house, but eventually, we were on good terms again, and we even hooked up a few times.
Now, in that scenario, both of us just weren’t right for each other. I realized that I had changed too much as a person and wanted more out of a girlfriend. But the bottom line is that in the long run, exes will forgive weak moments where you acted desperate after a breakup, like stalking for example. Women will be more forgiving because their biological clock is ticking. Finding the right man isn’t easy for a woman, and with every relationship that passes, her sexual market value degrades due to her age.
This is why female exes come back and forgive past mistakes. Eventually, women have to face the truth that no man is perfect, and there are only two choices in life: Keep on clinging to the unrealistic expectation to find the perfect prince charming, or make compromises and forgive a good man. Of course, this isn’t universally true, or rather, it depends on whether or not your ex will find a man who makes her happy. But in most cases, your ex will quickly realize that the grass is not greener on the other side and will no longer care that you stalked her. As long as you weren’t a terrible boyfriend — which I am sure you weren’t — she will find it in her heart to forgive you for those screwups.
Failed to do No Contact: When the Friends of your Ex Tell you to Back Off and Leave Her Alone
I got so insecure back then because I wanted her back and I just thought that if only I told her my perspective, we could fix things. After the breakup, I recognized how fucking stupid I was for my work getting in the way of our relationship. I wanted to change things, but after telling her that with one last message, her friend messaged me and told me to back off. She said that my ex doesn’t want to talk to me and that I need to accept that it’s over. I just gave into it because I didn’t want to cause more problems.
Her friend was spot-on about you needing to back off and give her space. That said, as I already mentioned, she didn’t as this out of the kindness of her heart. I bet you a 1000 bucks that this friend of hers absolutely hated you and just wanted you out of the picture. Why? Because all her friend knows about you is always coming from the biased perspective of your ex-girlfriend. So even if you wouldn’t have been terribly desperate, or even if your ex-girlfriend played a big part in the breakup and how everything spiraled out of control, she’d always get the inside scoop portrayed in a way that makes your ex-girlfriend looks good.
But, it’s correct that you need to back off and give her space instead of turning into a stalker. This is universally true for any relationship in life. Whenever there are people who don’t want to associate with you, you should ask yourself why that is. After a breakup with a woman, always accept that it is over for the time being. Trying to chase an ex girlfriend who holds animosity in her heart is like trying to pet a cat that isn’t used to human affection. No matter how hard you try, she will always recoil and viciously push you away.
A stoic man accepts the status quo that only time will make his ex-girlfriend open up. Even a cat will at times be closed off on one day, and then the next day come to you for affection. You don’t need to fix the situation because she will fix it for you if she loves you. But for that, you need the right mindset. I live in Indonesia, a majority Muslin country and because of that here they have countless cats here — pretty similar to Turkey. I’m a big cat lover and I love petting cats but if a cat doesn’t want my affection, I just shrug it off and keep on walking. And with an abundance mindset it won’t bother you. Either I will get another chance to pet the same cat in the future, or I will get plenty of opportunities to pet another cat.
One of the core tenets of stoicism that can be applied to breakups and the no contact rule is letting go of the attachment to external outcomes — in your case that is getting your ex-girlfriend back. And a second big core tenet is to become self-reliant, reflect on yourself, and improve yourself. So instead of trying to change the situation, talk to her friends and family, and so on, try to change something that’s within your control.
In your case, one big area of your life that is in your control are your work-related issues. Address your workaholic tendencies. Find a better way to live your life in a way that is in alignment with your relationship goals. Address it right now, and I guarantee you that you will reap the rewards of this in a few months from now when your ex-girlfriend reaches out to you. Don’t be one of the guys who just stand still after a breakup. Now is the best opportunity to find a better approach. Otherwise, your ex-girlfriend will be annoyed yet again.
There’s one notion in the self-help space that I really hate — and that is accepting everything “as is”. Nothing can be wrong. Your situation is meant to be that way. Don’t fight things. Your imperfections are a part of you and you should accept yourself for who you truly are. There is some truth to it, of course, but most things can be objectively perceived as something good or bad.
There is nothing more unhealthy after a breakup than not addressing the root causes that led you to your terrible relationship outcomes. Anyone who’s ever dated a narcissistic woman knows exactly how frustrating it is when a woman who never changes keeps on coming back. Your ex-girlfriend would be just as frustrated with you if you promise to change but never did so. I don’t know the exact details of what you wrote in your letter, but if you made a promise on how you’ll change your behaviors, then now it is time to stand by your word and work hard, ironically, to not work so hard anymore.
No contact should always be a forward-looking period. It’s very common to obsess over what happened in the past after a breakup. And to some extent that’s great, but the only way to get out of that cycle and become strong & attractive again is to look forward to the future. Who you were in the past is irrelevant after a breakup. Who you are becoming in the present is everything. For most guys, an ex girlfriend is going to reach out at least once. So when she reaches out to you, will you be inspiring to her, or did you obsess over the past? Stalking and begging is a form of being obsessed with the past. It’s massively unattractive to a woman because chasing her is not a masculine quality. Masculine energy is about chasing excellence — not chasing exes.
I am sure addressing your problem of being a workaholic is a fairly easy fix. Most people only land in bad jobs that require too much effort because they don’t know how to assert themselves. I’ve had several really great bosses in my life who didn’t treat me like slaves, and despite all of it, I still had great salaries and great career climb opportunities. Of course, a more demanding job title, something in management for example, will be more stressful but a management position should never be an excuse to not find the time for your relationships and other important aspects of your life. Most of the time, how you’re treated by bosses or clients is a direct result of what you accept. Relationships are no different. For example, if you tolerate an abusive woman who’s constantly jealous, you’ll become like a magnet to her. What you tolerate in life becomes what you attract.
A friend of mine is in a situation like this. He’s making a lot of good money on simple WordPress website development projects. Usually he has to work for barely 1 month to make roughly 10k USD. Depending how fast he gets something done, he can sometimes charge ridiculous sums for very little work. And in theory, this should be a pretty sweet deal. But due to the nature of never saying no to his clients, he’s always available for another call or another small request. And so while he makes good money, he is always unable to make time for himself to have great relationships, invest the money into a business, settle down, and so on. Which is ironic because he lives in South East Asia.
You could theoretically live off of 10k USD for an entire year over here if you rent a cheap 3k per year house. But he’s stuck in a treadmill of working for people he doesn’t like, who don’t respect him, who generally pay their bills way too late and try to always mess with him. And all of it because he can’t say no to simple requests. If he’d reduce his work hours a bit and not agree to every little request or meeting, he’d probably spend 30% less time and he’d have a great life and I’m sure he’d be in a relationship with a wonderful woman. So the outcomes in your relationships and work are always a result of what you accept from your life and business partners.
So give your ex-girlfriend the time she needs and spend your time away from your ex to create better life outcomes and when your ex-girlfriend comes back, she will be amazed how your life has changed.
No Contact for 3 Months: When you Haven’t Heard from your Ex in 3 Months
All this happened about two months ago. And now it’s been three months since the breakup. I have not heard anything from her since I talked to her friend. I’m not sure what I can still do at this point. I looked at her IG recently and she looks happy in her latest posts. Please let me know what I should do now.
No contact for 3 months is not very long considering when you made many mistakes after the breakup. You could theoretically do very few things wrong, and beg hardly at all and your ex-girlfriend could still take longer than three months for your ex-girlfriend to reach out to you. If we go back to the stalking-metaphor, what you are doing is slightly related to how a stalker would act. Now, I’m not saying you’re still doing this behavior of showing up at her condo unit. I’d like to compliment you on properly implementing no contact and giving her real space!
But to go back to the metaphor — what would a stalker of Taylor Swift do? He’d look for a sign that she’s home so he knows when to run into her. And by the way, I’m saying “He” because stalkers are in a majority men, whether it’s men stalking women, or men stalking men. So yea, that’s an interesting statistic. Maybe there’s a bit of a correlation to the fact that men tend to want their exes back right after a breakup, whereas women don’t want them back initially. So yea, it seems men lack emotional self-control with chasing, stalking, pursuing. It’s a bit ironic because that’s what a man should never do.
Now anyway, when you’re looking at her IG profile, it’s like you’re doing the same thing. When you lurk on her profile you’re looking for some sort of sign that can give you an indication that she might miss you:
- You want to know how she’s doing to find out what’s going on in her metaphorical house
- Is she happy?
- Is she dating someone?
- Has her life improved or are things worse without you?
Now, if you’re smart about it, your ex-girlfriend won’t find out that you checked out her social media profiles. That still doesn’t mean that you should do it. Not because you’re violating her privacy. I mean, if her profile is public, she can’t complain about it.
You simply shouldn’t lurk on her social media because it doesn’t really help you maintain no contact. It will make it much harder. You’ll start thinking about her again. You’ll become distracted. You won’t be focused on the things that you could be improving about your life — and this is not just about things related to the last relationship.
The best thing you can do after a breakup is to cultivate your mind. For example, if you’d be absolutely devastated after a breakup, pick three areas of your life that you want to improve, and read one book per month to learn something new in one of those areas. If you do that for 9 months, you’ll have learned so many new useful things. You’ll feel confident about yourself because knowledge is power. And when you soak up knowledge and become competent, you feel like a king.
And the truth is, depending on an exes attachment style, and many factors like in your case, the stalker-like behavior, it could take much longer than just 2 or 3 months for an ex to reach out to you. Now, even if she reaches out to you relatively early on, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she has opened up enough to the idea of actually going on a date with you. She might just reach out, and test the waters, but either you say the wrong thing, or she’s simply not yet ready to see you, and she’ll be gone again for another 2 or 3 months until she’s finally willing to see you and in the best case scenario, rekindle the relationship with you. You never know what stage of a breakup your ex girlfriend is going through. Anyone on the internet who tells you otherwise is a liar.
What you should do is maintain no contact exactly as you have been doing so far, but, to the extent that you haven’t picked out some things that you’d like to improve about your quality of life, pick something and work on that. And even if you’ve already worked on yourself after the breakup, keep on working on yourself. Or, have a good time! Life doesn’t always need to be so serious. Life’s short man! And every single minute that you spend occupied with your problems in your head is another one that you’re not spending to live a life worth remembering. Trust me, I’ve been there! And I’m not even talking about breakups right now. A smart man lives his life in a way that he won’t regret when he’s 60 years old.
Change is good. Even change that comes from breakups. Sometimes just shifting your focus a little bit when you have been too occupied with the same thing for too long can do wonders for your happiness. And certainly, focusing on an ex-girlfriend too much is something that needs to be mixed up. That’s not to say that you abandon the idea of re-attracting your ex-girlfriend, it just means that you go back to the mentality of a stoic: You can’t change the things around you, you can only change yourself. No contact becomes effective once you don’t even realize anylonger that you’re doing because something keeps you busy or something fulfills you.
And that’s the only right way to do no contact because there is never a 100% guarantee that an ex-girlfriend will come back, or that you’ll be able to rekindle the relationship. Not all relationships will last for a lifetime and that’s OK. That’s part of growing up and becoming a man. To face that painful truth but still stay positive keep moving forward. I see it all the time on my channel, in e-mail that I receive, or with my clients, that those guys who do all of it for their ex tend to be miserable, struggling a lot, and not enjoying their lives. But those who do no contact for themselves become happy, attractive, confident, and successful — and often get back with an ex when they least expect it because that’s when exes tend to come back. Once you are no longer needy and almost a little bit indifferent towards your ex because your life is in order, that’s when she will want to get in touch with you. So the best strategy for getting her back after being needy is to become content without her.
And that’s by the way why my entire course is designed with that mindset to do all of the personal growth for yourself. To empower yourself and regain your power — that’s how you do no contact properly. Whether you hardly begged or became a total stalker it’s always possible to turn your life around after a breakup.
